Sunday, February 15, 2015

Jeans Heart Shaped and Bottom Up

Getting ready for jeans on Pattern Review,  I got all excited about the competition and then I read the rules. Denim, max lycra 5%. Oh like I CARE about the lycra.....

My dream jeans are Kenneth King's Fortuny jeans.
Screen grab from Kenneth King's "Jeanius!" class, which I cannot endorse enough.

In fact, I'll wager few of those jeans in this shot are denim (center back are moleskin I believe). I believe jeans are the style, not the material.

But it's not my contest. 
I've had my pity party,
 put the brocade upholstery away...

and I only meant to cut out a muslin today, and figured, well, damn, might as well make the denim ones the muslin for the brocade ones to come.

One thing led to another...

And now I have the front pockets and pieces done. Will work on back and side seams tomorrow.


Yes, it was cheap and stretchy and JoAnn's. And I fell in loooooove

I've been trying to make a heart shaped yoke jean for awhile, too chicken to commit fabric to figure it out. The floral was supposed to be that, but I just didn't have enough material to cover it if it failed, and as ever, I get too fond of the 'muslin' fabric and ...go with a slight variation. These were version 5.5 of the cloned jeans, with the side seams rebalanced to the front by 1/2".

It is a little obsessive, but once I got within 1/2" here and there of the perfect fitting, perfectly comfortable jeans, it has been hard to stop. (oh, just go hit the 'jeans' in the label cloud. I got a million of these things....).

And then puttering around on Closet Case Files, I found this link to a Ginger remake with something called Bottom Up jeans by Liu Jo. Go read it. I'll be in the kitchen.

Liu Jo "Bottom Up" jeans 2014. 


Voila! Okay, so they don't fit the model very well.  The yoke gets wider towards the sides, and there's a horizontal dart midpocket. Just in case you are more KimK than JLo.

And a shout out regarding the pocket placement: it lines up with the center seam, not the yoke seam. Much better to my mind. Almost distracts from the side to side folds; poor, flat model!

I'm not doing the side dart, not that I don't need one, but I am doing that reversed yoke. In the perfect, unsubtle world, I would have a heart shaped effect with the yoke seam (slight dip in the center, rounded yoke that drops out on the side.  

For these jeans,  I want the yoke seam to line up with the pocket seam at the side seam; I don't want the front pocket outside edge to dip that low (don't want a slash pocket).  

This pair is made from some heavy 28" Japanese selvage denim, and I'm using the selvage and the reverse as contrast, so I don't want to get really busy looking.


2 comments:

  1. You are brave to tackle jeans. I just couldn't handle that much fitting inspection of my tush in it's current incarnation. Yours are looking good, though!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you. As fascinating as fitting jeans has been for me, the, how do you say? study of fit in the gluteal area is not something I think about in a larger context. I try not to go there.

      Yeah, I'll stop there.

      Delete

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